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A Postmodern Minimalism
John Haberin New York City
Roland Gebhardt, Carl D'Alvia, and Tom Doyle
When I think of art today, I think anything but minimal. Sure, galleries have shut the doors since the pandemic, although whole neighborhoods had already come and gone. Still, enough remain in the material world and online to challenge anyone to keep up.
Art itself speaks of eclecticism and excess. Sticking to one style already marks you as blind to the diversity of peoples and cultures—or so it often seems. If the same time artists have to leave their signature just to stand out in a crowded market, that, too, takes dancing around. Who wants to be just another painter or sculptor, mired in imitations of the past? For all that postmodern dance, though, late modern art refuses to let go, in and out of quotation marks. Roland Gebhardt and Carl D'Alvia find a less impersonal side to Minimalism and its rigor, while Tom Doyle in the mid-1960s shows how it all began. 
Artemisia Gentileschi knew all about a woman's impulse to revenge. She painted it, in work still shocking to this day, and she has left a once prominent male artist to labor in her shadow. The Met tried twenty years ago to claim her father as an equal in early Baroque Italy, but good luck with that. Doyle, too, is best known for the woman in the family, and a small show follows him and Eva Hesse on a trip to Germany in 1964 and 1965. It sees that year as crucial for them both, but with the emphasis on his free-standing sculpture. So what if the burden falls on those making an artist more than a footnote, only now to a woman?
Cutting corners
Part of the pleasure in catching up with Roland Gebhardt is in seeing how he does it—and part, too, is in how little he hides. No doubt all art has its touch of black magic, and Minimalism simultaneously intensified and dispelled the sleight of hand by making everything explicit. (Not a bad trick at that.) Gebhardt does so to this day, with regular shapes and repeated patterns in two and three dimensions. Part of the pleasure, too, is watching where one dimension leaves off and another begins.
Not that he spells everything out in words, like Sol LeWitt in the titles of his wall drawings. (Try to reconcile LeWitt's trust in words with late Modernism's insistence that everything is what it is, not a sign of something else. It can be done, and it says a great deal about the time.) Rather, Gebhardt trusts to simple shapes and shifting patterns. They can march across a surface or in a sequence of identical objects. He is simultaneously carving and painting in space.
The show, "Diverse Vocabularies," accepts the priority of words while making them hard to pin down. Verticals in unpainted wood stand side by side, no higher than one's waist. Shorter and thinner models painted white gain in height as they cross a table. The first bear identical cuts, interrupting the solidity and lightness of poplar. They ascend from one beam to the next, much as black accents on the painted wood rise closer and closer to eye level. The cuts also reach around the corner of the beam, until at last the part to the side reaches past the top and is gone.
Works on the wall have their sequences, too, of short black diagonals on white. They, too, can turn the corner only to disappear. They have crossed the line to panel paintings, but they may also pair with a version closer to sculpture, with the diagonals as cuts. One might be a study for the other or a playful alternative. The play on deletion and drawing also appears on paper, where a black trapezoid slides out and to the right from a white diamond, daring you to recognize what it left behind. It might tempt one to think not of Minimalist sculpture, but of Ellsworth Kelly and shaped canvas.
Galleries during the pandemic can seem like little more than pop-ups—all the more so with short runs for summer closings. And Gebhardt has been around, from his birth in Suriname in 1939 to studies in the Netherlands and Germany, but he is not just preserving the past. The light, polished wood has its appeal to craft and to the eye, quite different from industrial materials for Carl Andre or Donald Judd. It also shares the gallery with an artist closer to the eclecticism of contemporary abstraction. Galen Cheney has two bodies of work, one with a collage of fabric and Flashe, a rubber-based paint that has caught on in just the last few years. Yet she, too, speaks to what remains and what is left behind.
Cheney's combination of materials allows for the play of reflective and opaque colors. It also gives the series new energy, as long curves and dense overlays radiate outward from a painting's center. If the colors are bright, the white within them is brighter still. The other series, in turn, roots her Cheney in an earlier generation, when abstraction in America had its triumphs and slow burn. Their thicker surfaces, broad strokes, colliding or overlapping rectangles, and use of black recall Clyfford Still and West Coast art of the 1950s. Here, too, though, her lighter touch and color justify the show's title, "Slow Burn."
Bending over backward
Carl D'Alvia would bend over backward for you. These are big works, in eye-catching colors that owe more to industry than the rainbow. While they include bright red, yellow, blue, and green, I am still reaching for names for a few. D'Alvia works most often in aluminum and auto paint, with thick slabs that can rise eight feet or more. Still, they can never get all that far without bending. They will not stay put.
His sculptures may indeed bend back, to lean up against the wall, although I cannot swear that it is to get out of your way. With titles like Loaf and Loll, they could just be laid back. Other works bend forward, over themselves and back to the floor. Slabs can also accommodate one another. One in yellow runs flat along the floor, rising only to slip over another in industrial gray. The latter makes it part way up the wall, too. Where necessity is not enough, sculpture bunches up in tight, repeated curves on its own.
Motion is the order of the day, but so is that lazy rhythm. So, too, is mass. In a show called "Sometimes Sculpture Deserves a Break," you cannot demand that art gets off its butt, but you must also acknowledge its mass. When it reaches forward to the floor, it is doubling its footprint, the better to support itself. When it leans back, it is taking advantage of the wall. It builds on Minimalism, which made mass and space the order of the day, and a few additional works prefer steel, in a rust color closer to that of Richard Serra. Unlike Serra's Rolled and Forged or Reversed Curves, though, they will not force you out of the way.
D'Alvia may recall the West Coast Minimalism of John McCracken, who also leaned his slabs against the wall. Every so often the spray paint modulates to another color, for a touch of what California artists then called "Light and Space." Arbitrary outlines and solid colors may recall George Sugarman, and he looks further back as well. He cites Alexander Calder as an influence and indulges in Calder's red, while the steel rests on pedestals, where its curves may suggest early modern sculpture. He calls the series "Liths," as in monoliths from Stonehenge and beyond. They may be easy-going, but they take the long view.
More than that, they have their eclecticism, as the litany of names makes clear. In that, they belong to a moment around 1980 when Minimalism was starting to move every which way. Now in his fifties, D'Alvia must have had it on his mind when starting out. It included the leap of painting into the third dimension with Elizabeth Murray. It allowed for that overpowering sense of play. Slow meets fast, and mass meets motion.
John Chamberlain still has a near monopoly on automobile parts, although D'Alvia refuses Chamberlain's messy paint jobs out of Abstract Expressionism or crushed metal out of a car crash. Minimalism refused such matters of life and death, but then so for the most part does art now, apart from the turn to political art. These liths are too playful for a grander abstraction or for grief and grieving. When the yellow slab of Slowpokes crawls over its companion, it is taking its time. Still, this is fun stuff. With its simple paint jobs, it is closer than Chamberlain to the real auto industry as well.
A footnote to women
Historians and curators of all kinds have felt a mission: rescue women in art from a mere footnote to men. It can be part of a broader shift in a tight market to recovering forgotten artists or, conversely, to discovering the latest thing, but with an urgency for which feminism deserves full credit. It can mean remembering women long in the shadow of a movement or of a man. As scaffolding comes down at the foot of Broadway, the revelation of mosaic murals by Lee Krasner could serve as a parable, if only I had not missed them while they were gone. Some days all of American art can seem like a footnote to Jackson Pollock, his spouse included, but women may yet exact revenge—which brings me back to Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle.
Like Krasner and Pollock (and, for all I know, Artemisia Gentileschi), they had a difficult marriage. They divorced in 1966, and Doyle must have felt the loss a second time when Eva Hesse died of brain cancer three years later. Like the older pair, too, they knew each other's work intimately, from whatever studio space they could afford. One can imagine a cocksure couple enjoying a break together from New York and its norms. He was just thirty-seven and she was still in her twenties. The gallery sees Doyle's weighty constructions in her drawings, looking past Minimalism to unexpected curves and organic form.
He may still seem not her male counterpart but yet another man who misses the point. He was all but a footnote for me, too, to a 2006 Hesse retrospective at the Jewish Museum. Are her dark passages an unspoken threat? Her tactile surfaces and tubular structures command not just space, but a place in the unconsciousness. Doyle's welded steel is freestanding and fully conscious, in the tradition of David Smith but with an optimism and macho swagger all his own. As I wrote back then (and by all means read more at the links), "No limp threads or limp nipples for him."
That swagger is well-earned though, and so is a solo show. Doyle plays geometry against its support, while (barely) maintaining the distinction. His tilted planes over angled rods recall the cantilevered steel of Mark di Suvero, while mocking their own approach to a tripod. And his bright colors recall automobile and spray paint for Chamberlain, but without the wreck. His compositions can seem more staid or arbitrary, which may have something to do with his status as a footnote to history. Still, they belong to the same passage from Modernism to free play as Joel Shapiro and Hesse herself.
Was it Post-Minimalism, then, before its time, much like her art, or a greater richness in Minimalism itself? Was it, as a catalog essay argues, a uniquely "American Vernacular"? With his painted color and wiggly steel curves, he may have learned from her drawing after all. With her thrusts into space, did she, in turn, learn from him? Doyle, who died in 2016, is never less than abstract, and his limits make Hesse's darkness more precious than ever. Yet he points, too, to a reconsideration of late modern art.
He may be at his best at his least rickety, like a Minimalist after all. Sedentary Taurus could be cobbled together from irregular parts, but it is built to last. Its dark brown approaches polished wood or the rusted steel of di Suvero and Serra. It could also be the brown of an actual bull, rearing and charging, the green to the side the gleam in its eye. One can imagine it rearing and charging while maintaining its balance. A footnote has its limits, but it can serve as a man cave for a man who has earned his rest.
Roland Gebhardt ran at David Richard through August 6, 2021, and Galen Cheney through August 13, Carl D'Alvia at Hesse Flatow through July 10, and Tom Doyle at Zürcher through November 10.